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Dr. Virgil Cox remembers
"very well when the town (of Galax) was practically nil. "
Although he lived out in the
country and did not get into town often because transportation was poor, Dr.
Cox remembers when there were no houses. He was four or five years old when
he was brought into town for the auctioning of lots in the town.
"I told my mother about that
auction," he said. "I stood up in a wagon."
Dr. Cox's father, Jeff D. Cox,
born in 1862, saw the lot where Vass-Kapp is now sell for $250. He said he
was going to buy it, Dr. Cox said, and a friend told him it was a bad buy.
Dr. Cox went. to the Medical
College of Virginia during the depression. It was "a pitful sight to see
the stores in Galax when I would come home during those years," he said.
"At least half of them looked like ghost places. Nothing in there
whatsoever."
In 1936 Dr. Cox came back to Galax
to practice medicine, opening an office where Troy Goodson had a restaurant.
The building has since burned.
After practicing there two years,
he built an 11-room modern' building where Persinger is now.
The facility was approved as a
'tonsil clinic in the 1940's by the State Department of Health so insurance
would cover tonsillectomies.
In 1951, the building housing Dr.
Cox's present office was built by three men and is "one of the best
constructed buildings in this town now," Dr. Cox said.
In Jan. 1952 he opened the Blue
Ridge Hospital and Clinic. The patient load was so heavy that, within a short
time, he added another wing, and the facility was licensed as a 44-bed
hospital, which he ran for 5 years.
When the patient load became too
great for one doctor to carry, Dr. Cox leased the building to a group of
doctors some of whom are still practicing in Galax. A Dr. George from Roanoke
Memorial Hospital came to do surgery while Dr. Cox ran the hospital. Dr.
Sherter followed Dr. George, and then Dr. Jackson, who is now on the surgical
staff at the Mt. Airy hospital. Dr. Rios took his place in Galax.
The hospital was changed to Galax
General Hospital and Ken Waddell named hospital administrator, a position he
held until the hospital was closed when a number of the doctors felt they did
not have proper facilities in Galax.
Before the city could get a
Hill-Burton Hospital, the two local hospitals, Galax General and Waddell
Hospital, had to agree to close and never reopen as a hospital. Through the
"excellent leadership of Dr. Jack Bolen," Dr. Cox said, "a
campaign was successfully put on and we obtained what is now Twin County
Community Hospital. "
Dr. Cox called TCCH "one of
the best-run and best qualified and best staffed hospitals in the State of
Virginia."
When Dr. Cox started practice in
1936, he made house calls at any hour of the day or night for $2. At that
time, he said,the roads were extremely bad .. "A Ford car lasted me only
a year," he said. "The only fear I had of going to see patients at
2 o'clock in the morning was could I get there and back and not get stalled
in the mud and not make it."
Since those days, Galax has grown
from a small town "to be the nicest and best little city in the State of
Virginia," Dr. Cox said. He attributed that .... to the good government,
past and present, and the cooperation "of the finest people in the
world. "
At one point, when Galax General
Hospital was being run by Dr. B.F. Eckels, formerly of the teaching staff of
MCV, the fact that patients had no insurance and no money made it impossible
to carry on the hospital, so it closed, Dr. Cox said. It was opened at a
later date by Dr. Waddell, who later built and ran Waddell Hospital and
Clinic.
There were so few doctors here
when Dr. Cox came, he said, that he often took care of four maternity cases
in 24 hours along with all the other work. Maternity cases cost from $20 to
$50 and even then some people were unable to pay, he said.
Having practiced here 45 years,
Dr. Cox said, he realizes that his medical friends in the early days here
"practiced excellent medicine and were intelligent medical men. "
Dr. Cox's home on 406 West Stuart
Drive was built by Ed Cox approximately 75 years ago. Later Dr. Cox's uncle
bought it and in 1936, Dr. Cox bought it. It has nearly an acre of land, is
built out of the best materials and has approximately 20 rooms, Dr. Cox said,
and he paid $8,005 for it.
After spending "considerable
money" on the house, Dr. Cox says he has been approached by people
wanting to buy it, but says he wouldn't take $250,000 for it and is sure his
wife would not take half a million.
Another vast change in then and
now is malpractice insurance, Dr. Cox said. Back then he paid $17 per year
for malpractice insurance - and paid that amount for some 35 to 40 years.
Now, he said, it costs him nearly $3,000 per year.
Dr. Cox feels doctors try to do
their best, since word of mouth advertisement is the best there is, and feels
people should not sue when misfortunes occur. The big settlements in
malpractice suits these days, he said, force doctors to add that cost to
their patients' costs. Doctors, he added, had been shown to be the most
honest group of people in society.
Always praising his town and his
colleagues, Dr. Cox said he has been associated with the hospital since 1953
and with the personnel at Twin County Community Hospital, I have never heard
a derogatory word or ill-fated statement about another. They all get along so
well. It's like one big happy family."
And that, Dr. Cox concluded, is
what makes Galax a good community.
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